Building Context for the Content

I am cautioned that people will not understand what these bluebirds of social unhappiness mean:

• short-termism;

• market elitism;

• corporate gigantism;

• more that is more for fewer and fewer, leaving less that is less for the rest;

• financial system instability;

• retirement and civil society insecurity;

• cultural and ecological hostility;

• Dark Money capture of politics and public discourse;

• political divisiveness degenerating towards violence;

• persistent and pervasive inability of our common sense to hold our institutions of agency and authority accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercise of their institutional authority/power true to their institutional agency/purpose/mission.

This leaves me confounded, and perplexed.

With the exception of the last point, which I admit goes to the very core of our prevailing popular way of seeing our own personal, private and individual place in our shared, social and public world that we call the economy, and requires a lot of conversation to give it context, I did not invent these words.

I pirated them from the Internet.

Lifted them from social media.

Stole them from others (without properly scholarly citations - a sin of laziness to which I plead mea culpa, and beg your indulgence).

Since they are already current in the public domain, why won't they be understood when I use point to them as symptoms of a larger failing of our sociologies of social choosing, and link that failure to the choice by pensions to invest the money we are entrusting to their discretion in profit extraction from Growth, through securities trading?

The bits about securities trading and profit extraction and pensions, yeah. I expect that. Those are technicalities about money and finance that are not yet part of our common parlance. It will take some doing to introduce them into public discourse. I get that.

But the other bits. About the many different ways in which money and finance today are failing to deliver on the promise of Prosperity that we are being told will always flow, perfectly and virtuously, from Growth?

Those seem to be already pretty widely acknowledged. So why do they lose their currency when I link them to Pensions?

Then today I encountered this bit of wisdom, also on social media (this time with attribution):

Content without context is just noise.

Gordon RAY , Lecturer In Management, Technology, Strategy (MTS) at Grenoble Ecole de Management

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7313887149412540416?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28ugcPost%3A7313887149412540416%2C7313889257956241409%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287313889257956241409%2Curn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A7313887149412540416%29

Now, maybe, it makes sense.

In the context of yelling at Politicians and Corporations about bad actors who are acting badly, these bad consequences of their bad actions make perfect sense.

But in the context of updating and upgrading our common sense of pension investing, they lose all sense, because that context makes no sense to us. It's all just noise. And the content gets lost in that noise.

So, how do I build up that context, so that it's not just noise, and the content of our social unhappiness is not lost, but instead resonates as reasons for action?

This is not a problem that is unique to me. Every enterprise that is working to bring innovation to popular choice faces this moment, when it must build a new platform that will provide context for its new content, giving its message meaning that stands out from the noise.

What is perhaps unique to my innovation is the challenge of weaving technicalities of money and finance into a context of politics and policy that will give this content meaning, and separate it from the noise.

Maybe the bluebird can help.

The poetry of the bluebird as an harbinger of happiness is apparently a nearly universal human meme, with both ancient roots across cultural ancestries, and popular resonance, globally, even today.

In our prevailing popular narrative, Growth may be called the bluebird of our economic happiness: if GDP is growing, we are assured, this a sure sign that everything else will right in the world.

And so the awesome machinery of Government is focused on subsiding Growth in GDP.

Why?

It is a commonplace accepted by many that the purpose of Government is to Grow our Economy.

But in the United States, where I post from, the word "growth" does not appear in the foundational documents that actually constitute the government we are currently locked in a struggle to preserve.

The Preamble to our Constitution tells us:

We, the people, in order to:

• form a more perfect union,

• establish justice,

• insure domestic tranquility,

• provide for the common defense,

• promote the general welfare, and

• secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Unity. Equity. Tranquility. Security. Prosperity. Posterity.

These are the values that our Founding Fathers valued as the goals of Government.

Not Growth.

From the beginning, Government was constituted to promote happiness:

The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.

George Washington, January 9, 1790

https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/the-great-experiment#:~:text=The%20Great%20Experiment%3A%20George%20Washington%20and%20the%20American%20Republic,-September%2016%2C%201999&text=%22The%20establishment%20of%20our%20new,experiment%20for%20promoting%20human%20happiness.%22

So why are we so obsessed today with this phenomenon called Growth that we have made it the purpose of Government, all too often (as modern American politics are demonstrating) at the expense of unity, equity, tranquility, security, prosperity and posterity?

"Wait. What?", you say, "Growth at the expense of Prosperity? No. That's not right. We pursue Growth as the pathway to Prosperity. And with Prosperity through Growth we get security, tranquility, equity, unity and all those other good things that our Founding Fathers wanted."

Really?

Is that really the experience that our single-minded pursuit of Growth is actually creating for humanity today?

Our bluebirds of unhappiness, would say "No. Not really."

So we find ourselves caught in an existential crisis of No Confidence in Growth.

Which is a problem.

We want to reject Growth, but we feel we have no other choice.

Which is pretty depressing. And dispiriting.

While also kind of enraging.

We are roiling with emotions.

That is leaving us exhausted.

We can't go on like this.

Maybe we should just burn the whole thing down, and start all over again.

Maybe.

What else could we do?

Let's discuss.

How do we solve this problem? How did we get to this point in the first place?

Here's how I make sense of what is increasingly feeling like nonsense to increasing numbers of people.

In the 18th Century, when the US Constitution was being written, the wealth of nations lay in trade.

During the 19th Century, trade evolved into Progress into an infinitely receding geopbiophysical frontier, through technological innovation and economies of scale, in a lived experience that Nature is vast, and we are not, so we could just take and take and take from Nature, without ever reckoning with the consequences of our taking, because those consequences would always just disappear into the Frontier, reabsorbed back into Nature, without consequence. To us.

But by the end of the 19th Century, that Frontier had stopped receding.

Railroad tracks and shipping lanes crisscrossed the globe, and everywhere that humanity went, humans were already there.

There were no more

strange new worlds; ... new life and new civilizations;

Humans could no longer

boldly go where no man has gone before!

And that was traumatic.

The Colonial World Order stumbled. Then it sputtered. Then it collapsed in a paroxysm of industrialized warfare on a planetary scale that spanned the first 50 years of the 20th Century, in two installments, first as The Great War, that became the First World War, and then as WWII, the Second World War, that gave brith to the New International Order of the Rule of Law that replaced the former Colonial Order of the Rule of Loyalty, that broke down into a Cold War been the new Soviet Union that replaced the old empire of Czarist Russia and the West, that became an Arms Race that became a Space Race that became an economic competition between the Eastern Bloc and the West, that collapsed in 1989, when the Berlin Wall got torn down as the Soviet Union disintegrated, Germany reunified and NATO expanded into Eastern Europe.

Over the course of the 20th Century, as all of this was happening in World Politics, in money and finance the old 19th Century narrative of Progress got reduced to Growth as the simple numerical increase in transaction volumes measured in prices paid in money, from one period of measurement to the next.

Back the late 18th Century, when a new form of nation-state Constitutional self-government through electoral politics within an enfranchised national population was being forged in the fires of the American Revolution, people didn't talk much about Growth.

There were vigorous discussions about whether the purpose of the government was to protect the self-interests of Men of Property, or the happiness of a diverse, equitable and inclusive Humanity.

This dispute was eventually resolved in favor of DEI happiness (see George Washington above, himself a substantial Man of Property: it is a false story that all Men of Property believe in the superiority of Men of Property), although the resolution was at best an unstable compromise.

This tension between a Pursuit of Property and the Pursuit of Happiness is a trauma at the core of the American national psyche that has never been fully resolved.

This national trauma almost tore our Nation apart just "four score and seven years" after its creation through four years of bloody warfare, before the Nation reaffirmed our self-government as being "of the people, by the people and for the people" (Abraham Lincoln), and not of the people by property owners, for property owners.

Still, the trauma was not fully healed. Thrice more the soul of our nation was rent asunder by the claims of the few, to exercise dominion over the many. But the fight isn't about land so much any more. Property in our time has become money, and the claims of the few are the claims of the few who control the most money. And when we talk about controlling money in our time, we are talking about securities trading, which is how we finance Growth. In America. And around the World.

The first time in our time when the few tried to assert dominion over the many using money was the Gilded Age, when an unholy alliance between securities trading as a 19th Century evolutionary adaptation of 17th Century merchant-adventurer ship finance, and the new innovation of life insurance using actuarial science, as a 19th Century evolutionary adaptation of 17th Century merchant-adventurer ship insurance, fueled a new prosperity of Progress into an infinitely receding geobiophysical Frontier through technological innovation and economies of scale that blossomed into Monopolies through the device of the Trust controlled Robber Barons standing upon the backs of worker oppression and environmental depredations, until that boom went bust in the Panics of 1893 and 1907, requiring Teddy Roosevelt to ride in to bust up the trusts, and create the National Parks, while state legislatures made it illegal for insurance companies to finance securities trading with policyholders' premiums.

The second time was The Roaring Twenties, when Progress was transformed into growth in the scale of the corporation, after the old Colonial world order collapsed in the first convulsions of industrialized warfare on a planetary scale known at the time as The Great War, fueled by an unholy alliance between securities trading and depositary banking, that boomed until it went bust in the Crash of '29 and The Great Depression, requiring FDR to separate and regulate both commercial and investment banking, giving brith to the New Deal, and the new International Order of the Rule of Law for the Happiness of Humanity (and not just Men of Money), after the Second World War.

The third time is our time. Now. Today.

When the Corporation has become the Markets, and Happiness has been replaced by Growth as Progress stripped of all humanity, and reduced to simple, numerical increases in transaction volumes measured in prices paid in money, from one period of measurement to the next, but where money is not supposed to really matter, because it is really just a measure of what really is supposed to matter: the individual merit and personal morality of people whose control of money that is always and only supposed to be a consequence of individual merit and personal morality.

If our nation was forged as an "experiment for promoting human happiness" (George Washington), how have we become so caught up in our prevailing obsession (psychosis?) with dehumanized and dehumanizing Growth?

Once again, there is an unholy alliance around money at work again. And once again, securities trading is the principle institutional culprit. But this time it is securities trading allied with the Mid-Century Modern Social Innovation of social trusts for Workforce Pensions.

Vast sums of money have been aggregated, in the US, and around the world, into these social trusts, more than enough money to shape the entire global economy (although, in truth, not enough to actually specify the entire economy in all its details).

And this is virtuous money. Fiduciary Money. It has a purpose, and that purpose is human: to invest money for income as well as safety to assure income security in a dignified future for many, directly, as a private benefit, that is also for us all, consequently, as public good.

Turns out, George Washington was wrong about "The establishment of our new Government" being "the last great experiment for promoting human happiness".

The establishment of the social trust for workforce pensions is new great experiment for promoting human happiness.

But that great experiment has also taken a wrong turning, away from human happiness and towards social discord, through Growth.

We need to make a course correction. Not in Government. In Money.

Specifically, in Fiduciary Money.

Fortunately, we can use the Government to force that correction.

Which is good.

Because we don't really understand Money. Our context for that concept is incomplete

We do understand Government. Our context for that concept is very robust.